Our little Saffy got her first big haircut. After spending 45 minutes brushing her hair, I decided it was time. She was all too happy minimize her hair brushing sessions.
Her grandma did a great job of giving her a trim. She was so proud. We of course miss her long lovely curls, but she’s still adorably cute with shorter hair.
Here are the champtions!
Our amazing circuit box. We have a circuit for everything. Laird did the complicated weaving here. You should have seen it when it was just a mass of disorganized wires!
The wires for the network box that Eric did. Don’t worry it looked all orderly before it was covered with the foam insulation.
Foam insulation in the laundry room.
Foam insulation in the family room. Here they put a cloth over the studs and then filled the space with foam.
Hey, does this photo look familiar to all you anagram fans?
We got the insulation in the ceiling of the family room and the downstairs bedroom. We hope this makes it more possible for Eric and I to live with our teenagers.
Hooray! Walls! This is the family room and the very odd wall of closets in the “office.”
Gee, I hope they have enough drywall mud to do all the patching!
Patching and a strange little box on the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom. (It covers the upstairs sewer pipes.)
Okay, it’s been awhile since Passover 2008, but since I’m in charge of Eric’s blog now, I’m going to revisit days gone by. Sitting at my parents house one day, back when John and Emily lived in town. (We miss you!), I mentioned something about doing a Passover again. Now, if you know John, you don’t just casually mention something without intentions to follow through. So the next thing we knew we were planning a Passover seder. 
So I dug out the Haggadah I wrote up several years ago, and we unpacked the plastic “wine” glasses and started getting ready for Passover. I admit, we did not completely clear the house of hametz, nor did we burn the last crumbs. But we did clean up and vaccum.
Matzo, maror (bitter herbs- horseradish and romaine), karpas, salt water, the Four Questions and Elijah’s cup. We pretty much has a traditional Jewish seder with a few Christian side notes thrown in. And we did actually eat roasted lamb which I guess is not traditional, (at least not since 70 A.D when the temple was destroyed.)
Since Eric has given up on his blog lately, I thought I (Melinda) would fill in a few details. Miles is teaching me the intricacies of posting pictures. These are old pictures, but if you don’t live nearby they’ll be new to you.
We’ve gotten a lot of use out of Dad’s sawzall. The wall from the kitchen to the bathroom is one wall that is now gone. In this picture part of the wall was still there, but now it is gone.
Our ghost-like furniture. Today Dad and Nielson moved the couches and exercise bike up to my parents house. Amazingly they were fairly protected from the inches of dust. Notice the holes in the walls and ceiling. There are holes in every wall now. (Except, of course, the walls that aren’t there.)
In this corner between the reading room and my bedroom, a few more walls came out. This picture is looking from the reading room through what used to be the door-to-nowhere. You can see the bathroom straight ahead. The first time Ian walked into the gutted bathroom he looked around confused and asked, “Now, what room was this again?”
These kitchen cabinets hold some of the few things I did not pack away. It’s so nice I got to leave a few things where they were.
From my room looking into the corner of the reading room, down the hall and into the kitchen.
From the other direction, looking from the missing hall wall into my bedroom.
Eric and his consultant and helpers did a good job with the plumbing in the bathroom. This is after they moved the toilet the first time. (The toilet is that black pipe on the floor.) On Saturday they moved the toilet slightly to the south to accommodate Eric’s gigantic tub. They also replaced that cast-iron plumbing vent stack on Saturday. I hear the shower head is about seven feet up. So if you visit us, know that this is a bathroom built for a giant.
Progress on the house has been coming along nicely. Scott and Neil have been working hard, Arden has been doing the more skilled labor, the engineering and generally keeping everything on track and Lorraine has logistics under control.
All of the windows are in, demolition is complete and the walls have all been framed. These two upstairs bedroom had paneling that was just glued on to the walls.
The bedrooms are now framed and ready for the electrical, insulation, and drywall.
The basement is now all framed with all the windows in. We should hopefully get most of the electrical done this week, and maybe all of the plumbing (keep your fingers crossed!)
The window wells outside turned out really nicely. Scott did a great job grading the soil so it slopes away from the house.
We have a new outside yard hydrant that hooks up to the main water line. Our plants are still doing OK, despite not being able to water them every day.
Yeah for fresh grown tomatoes!
We’ve found many revealing things about our house by trying to renovate a couple of rooms (more than we ever wanted to know, to tell the truth.) Even though we didn’t plan on doing all this stuff, it’s good to get things taken care of.
Here we have the road closed off just for us so they can put in a new sewer line. The old one was made of clay and had several breaks in it and it it was partly disconnected out in the street.
That hole by our house is over 7 feet deep. Here’s one of the backhoes they used to dig up the street.
Here’s the dumpster that has become a permanent fixture in our driveway. They’ve already dumped it 3 times. Ian has the quite the formidable crowbar skills.
Here is our gutted basement family room. Arden pulled off an amazing bit of engineering to raise the height of the downstairs entrance.
One of the surprises after we pulled down all the ceiling tiles were the 6 structurally unsound joists. Here’s 2 that they had notched to put in some lights. Here’s one they cut into for a heating duct that has started to split.
Here is one of 2 joists that someone inexplicably cut straight up into, and then decided they better patch them with some 2x4’s.
We are glad to have them fixed before our floor caves in. What a relief!
